I don't think he is necessarily wrong.

I mean everyone's man crush Billy Beane thinks prospects have become way overvalued.

Gammons:
For all the trades this season, the only player in the midseason BB America top 50 moved is SS Addison Russell in the Samardzija deal

sure sounds like drafting and development is getting a lot more important

also, having all of your draft picks

i think we talked about this at the tailgate but the number one spot on my Amaro blunders list is when he signed Papelbon and surrendered a draft pick like two days before the new CBA wherein they would not have had to surrender a pick for signing him. it's comically bad. i literally can't think about it without laughing

Barry Jive wrote:i think we talked about this at the tailgate but the number one spot on my Amaro blunders list is when he signed Papelbon and surrendered a draft pick like two days before the new CBA wherein they would not have had to surrender a pick for signing him. it's comically bad. i literally can't think about it without laughing

yes we were. i was going to make a long post about how this single thing shows just how out of touch he is with what's going on as a whole but i was too defeated.

Fuck I had blocked that out of my brain

CalvinBall wrote:I don't think he is necessarily wrong.

I don't know if he's "necessarily" wrong, but he's "actually" wrong.

Amaro is terrible, arrogant, smug, etc... Deserves to be fired after the season, and I think he will be.

But he basically just made the same point about prospects that Billy Beane did, as Calvin pointed out. Obviously, he didn't articulate it as well as Beane, but Beane has been saying for a while now that the paradigm has shifted, in his opinion. For far too long teams did not value their prospects highly enough, but the market has corrected itself and we have now reached a point in the sport where the present isn't being highly valued enough. And this is what his staff has tried to exploit this season.

I don't have an issue with what he said, and I'm assuming the Phillies have had their one stat guy running some type of regression analysis illustrating this point to Amaro. Obviously, the A's have a much larger, brighter front office staff and can create much more impressive and thoughtful models, but my guess is that Amaro is right. Maybe by accident. Maybe he has data.

But I think that's why you saw so many trades with guys on 25 man rosters going both ways from the more well-run teams. The problem is the Phillies are so backed into a corner bc of Amaro that i don't know what you do. I would not have been happy just giving away guys for nothing.

There has to be some type of creative fix out there. Amaro isn't the guy to execute it, but there's gotta be something there that doesn't turn this into a ten year plan.

There are some things they can do to try to turn it around quicker. They may have already missed the boat with a lot of the Cuban prospects, but they can start dipping their toes into the foreign waters more for major league ready talent. I've never seen this Rusney Castillo guy play, but if he's any good they can sign him to be the new CF. I really wanted them to go after Jose Abreu even with Ryan Howard on the roster. It would have been a major financial burden in the short-term, but long-term it would have paid off. He's big-time box office, especially at CBP. He'd hit 50 HRs in this park. There are rumors that the Phils may look to buy out Howard anyway. It would have stung financially, but it also would have been nice to have Jose Abreu to look forward to after buying out Howard. But I digress, what's done is done.

They can try to go after a guy like Matt Kemp, who the Dodgers may be willing to eat most of salary for. He's no longer the MVP player he once was, but you can do a lot worse in the outfield than Matt Kemp. If he stays relatively healthy, he could be a good power source and run producer for the Phils. I'm not sure what the Dodgers would ask for if they were to eat a lot of his salary and if a bunch of teams are after him, that probably takes the Phils out of the running since they have little to trade.

He's just one example. Try to find outcasts from other teams that you think could flourish on your team. Find minimal risk, high reward signings. Either way, they are going to probably have to jack their pay roll way up in the short-term to compete, because the farm system sucks, and I don't think the ownership will okay that. The A's compiled a productive lineup without spending top dollar on it and not all of them were high end prospects from their farm system. Moss for example was an Phillies outcast. I just don't think this organization has the brains, commitment, or moxie to get it done. Not just with Amaro, but with ownership.

Tired and rambling... to many jumbled thoughts.... ugh

Revere passed Howard in OPS last night

danrosz wrote:I don't have an issue with what he said, and I'm assuming the Phillies have had their one stat guy running some type of regression analysis illustrating this point to Amaro. Obviously, the A's have a much larger, brighter front office staff and can create much more impressive and thoughtful models, but my guess is that Amaro is right. Maybe by accident. Maybe he has data.

But I think that's why you saw so many trades with guys on 25 man rosters going both ways from the more well-run teams. The problem is the Phillies are so backed into a corner bc of Amaro that i don't know what you do. I would not have been happy just giving away guys for nothing.

I don't know about the stats guy thing, unfortunately, but yeah, this. It's not even really debatable. Very few blue chip prospects were traded, and guys like Miller and Jackson were better/cheaper than our comparables.

Once again, there's not one person here who doesn't blame Amaro for our predicament and want him gone. Nothing to counterbalance there. But the Phillies have made a concerted effort to grow their farm system the past two years, which tells me Amaro's argument isn't just "prospects suck."

Ace Rothstein wrote:Revere passed Howard in OPS last night

filed in my "baseball is a funny game" cabinet in the folder labeled "gutbusters"

my 2 cents (actually more like 20cents ):
still a chance to move papelbon/byrd/bastardo/burnett in august, but i doubt it happens. not moving at least two of those four for a couple of midrange prospects this season will move ahead of the adams signing into my list of the top 5 failures of amaro as gm (behind the howard contract, papelbon contract, lee trade #2, and the pence buy high sell low combo).

get lee surgery and start rehab asap. should have done that in the first place. as soon as the velocity drop seemed chronic taking steps to produce a healthy 2015 version of lee was the best hope of salvaging some value from him.

given that i hink paps and bastardo and burnett will be gone or on the dl next year, that byrd will stay, and that the phils could benefit greatly from position switches that minimize defensive liabilities, my 2015 roster now looks like
this:
rotation = hamels-nola-lee-buchannan-m.a.g/pettibone/morgan
pen = giles-diekman-jdf-holland-martin-bjr-mag/pettibone/morgan (last spot is the "swingman")
bench = rupp, asche, brignac, sizemore, mayberry/revere, ruf/brown
c = ruiz (rupp)
1b = brown/ruf (asche, franco)
2b = utley (brignac)
ss = rollins (brignac)
3b = franco (brignac, asche)
rf = byrd (sizemore, mayberry, ruf)
cf = castro (sizemore, revere)
lf = revere/mayberry (sizemore, ruf)
cheerleader/batboy = howard

since age/injury is going to devalue all of the older players relative to this year more than any improvement we can expect from the younger ones, this roster will produce no better results than the 2014 version. the position switches just keep it from being worse. the only hope for better is having a new gm bring in major fa/cuban upgrades at some combination cf, 4th starter, or 1b.

Yeh, I agree that quote is much ado about nothing. There's plenty of stuff to complain about. I actually agree that prospects are being overvalued a bit. If there's a problem with it, it's that he probably believes it for the wrong reasons.

i think as usual the problem with the quote is that he said it in the smuggest, douchiest way possible and lacking any nuance. he basically sounds like someone who makes no distinction between "prospects" and career minor leaguers/fodder. but when he made that quote someone should have just said "brandon moss"

Another good one from Murph:

http://www.philly.com/philly/sports/phillies/20140801_Amaro_needs_to_get_real.html

Well, Amaro probably considered himself a prospect when he played.

Also remember the position he's coming from now (disregard that it's the bed he's made for himself for the purposes of this exercise).

At this point he'd be paying 2/3rds of the salary of Hamels/Lee/Douchnozzle for "prospects". That's a hefty price to pay for a non-blue-chipper to be playing in Reading or Scranton. Yes, when prospects are cheap and protectable you can value them properly; but the inclusion of the salary throws that value prop way out of whack.

Byrd/Bastardo, not so much though. Be interesting to see what we could've garnered for them. Possibly nobody even offered anything within their top 25 for them.